


Go on, it'll be late soon

by Mere_Mortifer



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: 5+1 Things, Almost Kiss, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Attempt at Humor, Bickering, But I did edit this for ten days straight, Character Study, Deadlights (IT), Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, Eddie Kaspbrak Loves Richie Tozier, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier-centric, First Kiss, Fluff and Angst, Friends to Lovers, Gay Richie Tozier, Homophobic Language, Internalized Homophobia, Light Angst, Love Confessions, Lovesick Richie Tozier, Lovesickness, M/M, Mentioned Maturin | The Turtle, Mutual Pining, Nothing too bad just Eddie quoting something shitty Bowers said, Oblivious Eddie Kaspbrak, Oblivious Richie Tozier, POV Richie Tozier, Pining, Reckless Use of Nicknames, Richie Tozier Loves Eddie Kaspbrak, Richie Tozier-centric, Soft Richie Tozier, The Hammock (IT), The Jade of the Orient (IT), Tropes, Unresolved Romantic Tension, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-23
Updated: 2019-12-23
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:13:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21918139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mere_Mortifer/pseuds/Mere_Mortifer
Summary: And Richie’s in love, in love, in love, now that it’s all about to end more than ever.He spends the next three days thinking how easy it would have been to lean down and kiss Eddie’s bloodied mouth – because, to be fair, that doesn’t sound any worse a promise than slicing your hand on a broken bottle to swear that if, when, needed he’ll be back to do it all over again.Or: five times Richie almost kisses Eddie and one time Eddie takes matters into his own hands.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 36
Kudos: 406





	Go on, it'll be late soon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [peteisfanatic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/peteisfanatic/gifts).



> It all happened so fast, officer...One day I woke up with a bunch of Bill Hader videos recommended on Youtube and before I knew it I was sobbing over Reddie fics in the middle of night. I swear it was an accident!
> 
> Anyway. This is my first fic in this fandom and it was written for the [Bill Hader Secret Santa](https://justlikebroth.tumblr.com/post/189139891978/wow-look-its-the-holidays-this-year-im-going), and my giftee was [Pete](https://daily-billhader.tumblr.com/) \-- man, I hope you like this. I really took your "almost kiss" prompt and, just...ran with it.  
> And thank you to [urisloveclub](https://urisloveclub.tumblr.com) for helping figure out the scenes and what to write!

_Just as it was, baby_  
_Before the otherness came  
And I knew its name  
The drug, the dark, the light, the shame_

_\- Hozier, 'As it was'_

#  **⛦ 1.**

_June, 1989_

“Move over, fuckface.”

Richie sniffs, hides his grin behind the copy of Spiderman he’s pretending to read. He can hear Eddie rhythmically tap his foot. The dirt that passes as the floor of their Clubhouse makes the sound dull, but Eds just stomps his well-loved sneaker harder, and it’s obvious to Richie that he’s putting a lot of effort into showing he’s annoyed. It makes him grin wider.  
“Are you seriously pretending I’m not here?” Eddie scoffs. “Did you mentally regress to kindergarten?”

Richie makes a big show of turning the page of his comic, and touches a foot to the ground so he can gently swing the hammock side to side. “Eds,” he says, because he’s incapable of ignoring him for over ten seconds, “we’re the only two people here. You can sit literally anywhere else — my ass is not leaving this hammock.”  
Richie looks up from his comic, trying to school his face into a serious expression. He fails miserably when he sees that Eddie, too, as always when they play their favourite game of _Let’s pretend we really annoy each other_ , is contorting his mouth into a weird frown to hide his smile.  
“You’re particularly stupid today,” he comments, and Richie flips him off. “First of all, what the fuck you want me to do, sit on the _floor_? So some spider can sneak up my leg and bite me?”  
“It worked out well for this guy,” says Richie, tapping his index finger on Peter Parker’s face on the cover.  
“No it didn’t, anyone he loves is fucking _dead._ And second, I asked you just to move over a bit, we can share.”

Richie tries to answer, or even prepare himself to have Eddie’s almost naked legs practically in his lap (those red fucking shorts, he _swears,_ they’ve been the bane of Richie’s existence since the first time Eds strolled out of his house with them on like all that _skin_ wouldn’t drive Richie insane). He can’t do any of the two, though, not with Eddie already wrestling his way onto the hammock — so Richie seizes the opportunity to touch him. He grabs at his arms and legs and his soft brown hair that always smells like mint until they’re both comfortably lying down. 

It’s- it’s different than usual, Richie can’t help but notice. It’s far from the first time that they share the hammock – hell, it’s a running gag for them to squeeze themselves on it and argue the whole time, mostly for the benefit (dismay) of the rest of the Losers. They bicker, they insult each other, Richie pretends not to be painfully aware of every inch of their bodies touching, and that’s how it always goes.

This time they’re alone. This time there’s no distraction from Eddie’s naked calf pressed against his own, or Eddie’s hair brushing his jaw – and why, why, _why_ did Eddie lay down like this this time, head near Richie’s and their feet tangled?  
“Spaghetti,” he says, praying that his voice doesn’t sound as enamoured as he feels, “if you wanted to cuddle you could have just said so.”  
_It’s funny ‘cause it’s true_ , Richie thinks, and imagines an audience watching the scene and quietly judging him. _Breaking news: local gay boy is starved for affection!_  
“God, these nicknames keep getting worse and worse,” comments Eddie, but there’s no bite to it. He snatches the comic out of Richie’s hands and he flips back the pages to the first one. “Now shut up, I’m trying to read.”  
“I read that part already,“ he complains (false, his eyes were scanning the drawings but his mind was all focused on Eddie, busy being a little hypochondriac as usual in his stupid little shorts, and Richie is smitten, smitten, smitten). Eddie bitches right back about _literally not giving half of a shit_ , and the bantering distracts Richie well enough from how close their bodies are.

The moment when his heart was ready to jump in his throat to suffocate him passes, and for a while being with Eddie doesn’t feel any different than how it was two, three, five years ago.  
Then Richie makes a mistake.

They are actually reading the comic now, both silent and focused on the story, which is turning... worryingly romantic. Nothing he would normally bat an eye at, just Peter and Mary Jane kissing each other in a tearful goodbye – but now, with the golden light of the sunset filtering from the cracks in the ceiling, with Eddie’s arm burning a brand where it’s draped over Richie’s stomach, it feels like an accusation. Like an invite.

 _And God, try to understand_ , he thinks, addressing the invisible audience observing the scene, the one he always imagines listening on whenever he opens his mouth and cracks a joke. Sometime it laughs, sometimes it boos, sometimes it looks on in glacial silence, judging, judging, judging. _I can’t help it, I swear I didn’t choose this_ and his eyes, straining to look at Eddie without turning his head, fall on his lips. 

Richie _wants_. To lean down, to kiss Eddie straight on the mouth, to feel his breath that always smells of that vague liquorice scent from his inhaler on his lips– but more than anything, he wants Eddie to kiss back. He briefly images a world where on the pages of his comic Peter is kissing Harry Osborn or Johnny Storm instead and it’s okay, it’s _fine_ , no one even cares, and it may be a nice fantasy but it makes his chest hurt. The sheer impossibility of it.  
“Eds,” he finds himself saying, his stupid mouth running off without his permission. His voice sounds too soft to his own ears.  
“Don’t call me that,” Eddie answers, an involuntary reflex by now, but he still looks up at him. Warm brown eyes, freckles faint on the softly tanned skin. “What?”

For a second he almost does it. For a second that terrible audience disappears, and it’s just Richie and his best friend, and nothing can go wrong, surely, not even Pennywise would dare intrude on the moment-

Then there’s a loud laugh coming from above them, the voices of Stan and Mike arguing about something – and then Big Bill jumps down in the Clubhouse in a flutter of untied shoe laces. “Hi guys. Y-you been here l-long?”  
“Not really,” answers Eddie, and he rolls off the hammock to greet him and the rest of the Losers.  
Richie tries to smile and be his usual loud self, but the weight of what he almost did is difficult to carry. If the confused looks on his friends’ faces are anything to go by, he’s not succeeding.  
_You saw how fast he got up when the others arrived?_ , a voice in his head keeps telling him. It sounds a bit like a snarling werewolf, a bit like Henry Bowers...but mostly like his own. _He was ashamed to be seen so close with you. You almost ruined everything – you better learn your lesson, kid._

Ashamed, ashamed, ashamed.

He feels Eddie’s gaze fixed on his face, but Richie doesn’t let himself look back for the rest of the day. 

#  **⛦ 2.**

_August, 1989_

The temptation to royally piss off Eddie is too strong to resist. He doesn’t even try to.

Richie uncaps the black marker with his teeth, and he puts all his effort into neatly writing _jerk off less hard next time!_ on Eddie’s cast, clear as day on the white plaster.  
He stays all bunched over the cast until he’s done, sure that if Eddie catches a glimpse of what he’s doing he would put a stop to it with sound slap on the back of Richie’s head. 

They’re sitting on two abandoned fruit crates in the alley near Mr. Keene’s pharmacy, waiting for Stan to join them. As much as Eddie hates taking refuge there, next to the trash cans, it’s the perfect spot to hide in case Bowers and the rest of his gang are perusing the town looking for something to throw punches and slurs at.

(Turns out that facing a psychotic, shape-shifting killer clown doesn’t make bullies any more appealing or non-threatening.)

When Eds took a marker out of his fanny-pack and silently handed it to him, Richie knew _exactly_ what he was going to write. He moved his broken arm in his lap for better access and got to work.  
“Done!” he exclaims, grinning wildly as he leans back.  
Eddie’s face journey as he reads, going from curious to incredulous to murderous, is the best thing Richie’s has ever seen. A work of art, really.  
“You _asshole_ ,” Eds yells, voice cracking at the end and just _filled_ with rage. Richie still struggles to believe how much anger Eddie can fit inside such a tiny body, and it never fails to make him laugh until tears come out. “I knew I should have asked Stan first, why the fuck do I ever trust you with anything- and stop laughing, dickwad, my mom’s going to throw a fit when he sees I have this shit written on my arm. She’s already gonna be mad that I hung out with you guys! Richie. _Richie_.”  
Richie bites his lip as he tries to stop cackling. “What?”  
Eddie is looking at him with an intensely serious expression on his face– God, how can eyebrows look so _aggressive_? – but then it becomes obvious that he’s just trying not to laugh. He’s pressing his lips together so hard in an attempt to keep the smile at bay that they basically disappear.  
And with the last semblance of anger, he says: “Richie. I need you to know that Pennywise may be terrifying and It will probably end up killing us all – but my least favourite clown will always be _you,_ Trashmouth.”

Eddie then breaks down in laughter, with Richie almost screaming in delight at the joke. Ruthless, his Eddie can be, just fucking _ruthless_! He loves it. He loves him.  
_Please be there to insult me for the rest of our lives_ , Richie thinks but doesn’t say and it’s such a tender, _pathetic_ thought that it makes the laugh die in his throat in a matter of seconds. But fuck, he wants it – and with an intensity that would be scary if this was any other summer in any other town.

As it is, Richie became accustomed early on with thinking in such absolutes. All the Losers, they’ve had death on their minds so often because of It that everything else has taken on taken on the sharp clarity of desperation – _I'm gonna beat every fucking high score at the Arcade, you just watch me; is there a higher point to jump from into the quarry?; we should have a sleepover every night, stay awake till dawn; guys I don’t wanna die because of a fucking clown I wanna live I wanna live I wanna live-_

 _I wanna live_. Richie thinks it so much whenever he’s with Eddie he’s sure his trash mouth will end up saying it out loud. _I wanna live by your side._

Why does it feel like he's running out of time to be with him?

God, he’s so fucking gone it’s not even funny. 

“Okay, okay, I was just kidding Eds,” he says when they’ve calmed down. “Come here, I’ll cross it out. I know Mrs. K would get a stroke if she saw it.”  
“...Richie.”  
“I swear! Don’t you trust me?”  
“Absolutely not,” Eddie responds, but he offers his broken arm to Richie again. Richie scoots closer and crosses the original line (the only other writing on the cast apart from the Lo ~~s~~ ver, because Eddie asked him to sing it before anyone else – not that it made Richie disproportionally happy or anything) with a neat straight line.  
He thinks of what to write instead. Another joke? Nah, it doesn’t seem right.  
Richie dares glancing up at Eddie’s curious face. Everytime he finds himself so close to those big, warm eyes of his, the same song starts playing in his head. 

_(How I’ve waited for you, you’ll never know)_

Embarrassed, and shaken to his core by the wave of yearning that sweeps over him, Richie looks back down. He settles on something so honest no-one will take it seriously. 

_(Please Eddie, don’t make me wait too long)_

Jesus, when the fuck did he turn into such a _sap?_

“How sweet,” Eddie comments after reading it, eyes rolling skyward. “Well, it’s definitely better than the first one. Thanks, Rich.”  
Richie looks down at the cast and feels a nauseating mix of love and shame and fear that he’s, sadly, quite used to by now.  
_Get better soon, Eddie my love. -Richie Trashmouth Tozier._ _  
_ Right there, clear as day, a confession as explicit as he’ll let himself give. 

_We could die before school starts again_ , he thinks suddenly. Heart aching, he pretends to clean his already clean glasses with the hem of his shirt.  
A stupid sentence scribbled on something Eddie can’t wait to get rid of, a sentence everyone will take as a joke, because he’s assigned himself the role of the Funny One: that’s the best he can do to express feelings so enormous he struggles to believe anyone has ever felt like this before.

(But somehow other people _do_ feel like this, they live their fucking life feeling like _this_ ; and with their hands shaking and their stomachs tied up in knots and their thoughts a jumbled mess of _him, him, him_ they even find the fucking energy to write songs and poems about it. The most Richie found the strength to do was carving two letters on a piece of wood.)

Oh, but they’re sitting so close. Eddie’s _right fucking there,_ not five inches from Richie, with this shy half-smile tugging at his lips – and they’re having _a moment,_ aren’t they, in this little bubble of time that Richie has yet to ruin by opening his mouth. What would be so wrong about using said mouth for something more honest than talking, just this once?

He actually starts to lean in. And what’s shocking, what’s absolutely _bananas_ in his opinion, is that Eddie is not moving away like he expected he would. It’s starting to look like he might even let Richie close off the distance-

Which is when the klaxon of a car, running on the street just out of sight, startles him enough that he jumps back with a _ho-ly fuck!_

The world catches up to him. He remembers this is his best friend, that there’s no way Eddie likes kissing _boys_ , let alone _Richie,_ let alone behind a dumpster in close-minded, clown-infested Derry.  
The spell breaks.  
“Well,” he says to fill the silence. What were they doing a second ago, before he lost his goddamn mind?  
Oh, yes, he signed the cast. “You’re welcome, Spaghetti. I wouldn’t trust Bev with a marker near that thing though, she’s gonna write something _nasty_. She looks all innocent, but she’s a _freak_.”  
“I’m telling her you said that.”  
“Nooo, Eds, she won’t let me smoke her cigarettes anymore!”  
“Yeah, well, you’re welcome. I don't want you to get sick. That shit gives you cancer, you know?”  
“Your mom gave me cancer.”  
“That’s not even a joke – no, shut up, it’s not. Fucking draw me a scheme of the joke, asshole-”

And back and forth they go, arguing and laughing and annoying each other until Stan arrives with ice-creams for them both. Richie licks some from Eddie’s cone as Stan signs the cast in his annoyingly perfect cursive (“Richie that is disgusting – Stan, tell him it’s disgusting”), and so the moment passes. 

The next time he thinks about how close he was to feeling Eddie’s lips on his he’s lying awake in bed, hugging one of his pillows for dear life, blushing furiously in the dark. 

#  **⛦ 3.**

_March, 1993_

“I’m so fucking sick of this school.”

Richie hums in agreement as he soaks a tissue in the peroxide water that, he suspects, Eddie evoked from thin air. “And I can’t believe you bring a bottle of this shit with you everywhere,” he say, and starts cleaning the blood that dripped down Eddie’s chin.  
“Oh, you can’t? It’s not like there isn’t some wanna-be bully every year who just _loves_ pushing the asthmatic kid around, right?”, he says, and hisses softly when the peroxide touches the cut on his lip.  
“You’re not asthmatic, Spaghetti,” mumbles Richie.  
Eddie asked him to help him clean up (there are no mirrors in their school bathrooms), and he’s trying very hard to do a good job – mostly because it’s an excellent excuse to stare at Eddie’s lips. Also, yeah, of course, he wants to take good care of his best friend or whatever.  
“Liam the-world-is-my-punching-bag Webb doesn’t know that – and stop calling me Spaghetti. If someone hears you calling me that they’re gonna punch the both of us for sure.”  
“Aw,” coos Richie, still dabbing his split lip with the cotton, “is that why you don’t like my nicknames? You’re worried about little ol’ me?”  
Eddie arches the corner of his mouth that’s still intact in an awkward half-smile. 

He fell on the ground, Eddie has explained him, as he was running away from Liam Webb & Co., doing to himself what Liam’s fist had failed to: he hit the gym’s floor _hard_ , and his bottom lip was already swelling up by the time he had found Richie smoking a cigarette in the boy’s bathroom. (“Why are you not in math class?”, he had said. And Richie, watching the blood dripping from his mouth and down his chin: “Why do you look like an extra in a Tarantino movie?”)

“I’m worried about _both_ of us,” Eddie explains. “One of these days you’ll call me ‘Eddie my love’ too loudly and before you know it someone is throwing us in the Kenduskeag for being ‘ _too queer to live_ ’. I heard Bowers say that shit years ago, can you believe it?”  
Richie swears he feels his blood turn cold in his veins. “Ah!” he exclaims, forcing a bitter laugh out of his throat, “that’s- I’m afraid that’s depressingly accurate, Eds. Small towns! Love them, can’t leave them!”

Unwanted, the feeling of being performing in front of an unimpressed crowd returns.  
You’d think an ancient alien that feeds on children and fear would still be the thing that terrifies him the most. Yet it seems that now, as it was four years ago, Richie’s worst enemy is all in his head.  
_Go on, Trashmouth_ , he can almost hear the audience whisper in chorus, _convince us you’re not just a scared little boy who wants to kiss other boys. The performance of a lifetime. It could win you an Oscar._ _  
_ _Not boys,_ he thinks, uselessly – _just his one_. 

He finishes cleaning the last traces of blood from Eddie and puts some distance between them. The way one of his hands was resting on Eddie’s knee to balance himself feels too obvious now. Not something a friend would do, not an innocent or natural gesture, just an excuse to touch him when he shouldn’t.  
_Greedy, greedy, greedy,_ voices accuse him in his mind, and not surprisingly many of them are Richie’s own. _Oh_ , _the things you’ve stolen from your best friend without him knowing_. 

Glances. Touches. One of his inhalers, years ago, which he still keeps under his pillow to hold onto when he wakes up from some clown-infested nightmare. Kisses _would_ be part of the list, had he been more brave – that day on the hammock; when Eddie’s arm was still broken; infinite moments both before and after, all crystal clear in Richie’s mind with the strength that only _what if_ ’s can have.

“We can, though,” Eddie says. His voice is low, somber. “Leave them, I mean. Leave Derry. It’s gonna happen pretty soon, actually – what’s, five months now? Not even?”

Ah, yes. College. A dream for Richie – and the rest of the Losers, really – for the longest time; a nightmare since the moment he realized they’ve all been accepted in different ones.  
(“How the fuck is that even possible?” he remembers yelling at the others, _with_ the others, one day in the Barrens. “What are the fucking _chances_?”)  
Finding out that Stan would be eventually living four hours away from him broke his heart. Finding out that Eddie would be in fucking _New York_ had felt like getting stabbed in the chest. 

He has been glued to this kid for the better part of their childhood and now he’s suddenly, what? Supposed to be okay with being miles and miles and _miles_ away? 

“Mh, I know”, he says. “Do you reckon there’ll be bullies in your fancy-schmancy college?”  
Eddie snorts. He still looks a little sad, although Richie can’t tell if it’s because he was also thinking of their imminent separation or because he got beat up, like, ten minutes ago. “Fuck, I sure hope not.” And then, looking up at him with big brown eyes, warm even in the unforgiving neon lights of the bathroom: “I’ll miss you, Rich.”

_(I’ll miss you too, I’ll think of you every day and Eds I’ll tell you before the summer is over I swear I’ll tell you I’ve been in love with you since we were twelve who even gives a shit anymore I just need you to know I need you to know and I need to know if you)_

Richie grins. “I’ll miss fucking your mom.”  
“Oh my God, seriously? You suck!”  
“No, she sucks, and _very_ well-”  
“That’s it, I take it back. You’re the bane of my existence and I will not miss you for a second.”

Eddie shaking his head. Eddie saying something about being sick of staying in that bathroom and _you’d thing pissing in the toilet would be easier than covering every inch of the floor, ugh._ Eddie forcing him to go to the infirmary with him to take some ice; Richie annoying him until he agrees to skip last period and go eat a waffle or something – and then two of them hiding in a deserted café with Richie’s Walkman and Eddie’s _embarrassing_ taste in music until lunch.  
And Richie’s in love, in love, in love, now that it’s all about to end more than ever. He spends the next three days thinking how easy it would have been to lean down and kiss Eddie’s bloodied mouth – because, to be fair, that doesn’t sound any worse a promise than slicing your hand on a broken bottle to swear that if, when, needed he’ll be back to do it all over again.

#  **⛦ 4.**

_September, 2016_

How, exactly, did he forget all this? All of _them?_

Since he received the call from Mike, roughly eighteen hours ago, the question has been going on a loop in his mind. 

He remembered Stan first, as he stood on that stage in front of thousands of people, microphone in hand. Vague images of button-up shirts and binoculars (bird-watching _?)_ kept him so distracted he ended fucking up his own introduction.  
“My name is Trash...mouth. Trashmouth Tozier”, he mumbled in the mic, dazed. The memory of a curly-haired boy, the first friend he had ever made, using that very nickname resurfaced. It became more vivid than the crowd watching him. _Trashmouth_. He hadn’t thought about that in years.

He ran off stage. 

( _Endless days spent with other kids in the Barrens, and what a stupid name for it, right? To Richie it looked as luxuriant as a jungle)_

He needed to be away from people. He had to go and start packing, quick, Mike said it was important and Richie _promised_.

( _No, not other kids – his friends, the best he’s ever had. Mike was one of them, one of the Lucky Seven. How did they use to call their little group? The_ Losers _!_ _That was it!)_

“Tozier, where the fuck are you going? These people paid good money to see you!” yelled Andy, hot on his heels.  
Richie unlocked his car with trembling fingers and got in. “Give them a refund, I don’t care. I have to go.”

( _Eating ice-creams in front of the Aladdin in a haste because the movie was about to start. Stuttering Bill not smiling for months after– after_ something _happened, no matter how hard Richie tried to make him laugh_ )

Before he knew it he was already back to his apartment, throwing random clothes in a suitcase; t-shirts and jeans, a pair of sneakers and every single Hawaiian shirt present in his wardrobe. He realized only later that he brought exclusively things he used to wear as a teen.

( _Red curls. A white bra Richie pretended to be fascinated with. Beverly smiling and offering him a cigarette, everyone else sunbathing near a – quarry? Could it be?_ )

He called his assistant to buy a plane ticket to Maine because his brain felt too scrambled to do it himself. He drove to the airport in a feverish state – he talked to himself the whole way there, Voices he hadn’t used in decades tumbling out of his lips in a nonsensical stream of consciousness.

( _Building a dam in the rivers, jeans rolled up his calves to keep them dry. A boy he used to call Haystack, his real name still too foggy in his mind, directing him and the others with the same expertise of a skilled architect)_

He finally calmed down a bit only when he was on the plane, ready to sleep until destination. But he couldn’t stop the onslaught of memories still assaulting him, so he stared out the window the whole time, not truly seeing anything. 

( _An inhaler. Endless bickering. A fanny-pack filled with pills. ‘Lover’ written with a bright red V, freckles that came out only in the summer, Richie’s fingers curled around a tanned leg, red shorts, sneaking through a window for an impromptu sleepover, warm brown eyes, “I’ll call you when I get to New York, I swear”, and oh – Eddie, Eddie,_ Eddie)

And here he is now. Jade of the Orient. Derry, Maine. 

Richie can’t help staring at him.  
There he is, his former best friend: all grown up, sitting on the other side of the table and talking so fast about the danger of eating raw fish it’s practically incomprehensible. Bill starts shaking his head and hides his smile behind his glass, but Richie can follow Eddie’s rambling easily, now as he could when they were ten, thirteen, seventeen.

 _Oh God_ , he thinks, his heart picking up the tempo, _I can’t believe this shit._ _  
_ Twenty-seven years and a partial amnesia later and he still feels for this doe-eyed, hypochondriac neat-freak the same as he did when he was a teenager. He’s got it _bad_. 

Richie does the only thing that makes sense: he gets shit-faced.

(The second he starts picking up the shot glass with his mouth and then proceeds to sneak glances at Eddie to see if he’s impressed is, Richie’s fairly sure, the _gayest_ he’s ever felt. And he’s had sex with men before.) 

Being drunk is the excuse he gives himself for a lot of things that night: for asking if Eddie is married _to, like, a woman_ (incredibly subtle!), for the Jabba the Hutt impression (that at least makes everyone laugh), for yelling only Eddie’s name in pure panic when the fortune-cookies-from-Hell start attacking them (sorry, Ben, nothing personal).

The general mood takes a nosedive when Mike brings up Pennywise and they all remember what exactly brought them together in the summer of 1989.  
Richie is almost impressed with whatever magic concealed the entire experience when all the Losers, one by one, left Derry – but mostly he’s pissed that he’s spent one third of his life with an Eddie-shaped hole in heart without even knowing it. 

He’s desperate to grab Eddie’s hand, run to his car and get the hell out of there.  
Richie’s still drunk enough that he can ignore Stan’s absence and all the implications that come with it ( _“Guess Stanley couldn’t cut it…? What the fuck does that mean?”_ ). Still drunk enough to forget all subtlety. 

He hangs back from the others as they get out of the restaurant, tugging on Eddie’s wrist until he turns to look at him.  
“Richie?” he asks, furrowing those ridiculous eyebrows of his. Richie is so far gone for this guy that he finds them extremely attractive.  
“I just- you okay, Eds?” He uses to nickname hoping, selfishly, to still be the only person in his life to do so.  
“I’m as alright as I can be, I guess,” Eddie sighs. It’s still so weird seeing him all grown up like this – but the way he looks off in the distance, worrying at his bottom lip, is so familiar that Richie is thrown, once again, straight back to his childhood. “And don’t call me that,” he says without even looking at him, a smile tugging up the corner of his lips.  
_He’s playing along,_ Richie thinks. _My Eddie Spaghetti, playing along, playing with me like we used to._

And you know what, _you know what_ – he run here and possibly ruined his entire career on the basis of a bloodied promise he made twenty-seven years ago. So while he’s at it, why not finally make good on _another_ promise? This one made to the Universe and himself, repeated like a mantra to his tear-stained pillow, muttered under his breath, written on every corner of his school books. _I’ll tell him_.  
_I’ll tell him after we kill this fucking clown. I’ll tell him today at the Arcade. I’ll tell him tonight at his house, tomorrow at school, when summer starts, when summer ends, before he leaves for college. I swear I swear I swear._

And then he never did. By the time he was one hour away from Derry, Eddie had faded from his mind and the promise hadn’t mattered anymore.  
Here he is, though. Eddie’s married, Richie’s drunk, who cares, _let’s fucking do it._

He steps closer to Eddie, takes a second to fix his glasses up his nose. Eddie looks up at him, confused, and his right hand goes to Richie’s forearm as if to keep him upright.  
“Rich?” he says again. He looks good, notices Richie not for the first time that night, really good. His cheekbones are more pronounced now and he lost most of the softness that still hung around his face at seventeen, when he looked like a Renaissance angel come to life. The eyes though, they stayed the same – still warm and big and expressive, and...and…  
“Eds,” he whispers, and for once in his life he can’t get any words out of his mouth.  
He’s standing in front of the only man he’s ever truly loved, and the enormity of the realization leaves him speechless. Only one thought in his mind; that they should kiss, now before everything inevitably goes to shit again, they should kiss, they should _take their fucking shirts off and kiss_ -

 _“_ Guys,” Beverly’s soft voice calls them. She sounds like she’s on the verge of tears. “Stan- Stan passed away.”

Oh.

Richie’s suddenly very sober. See? Everything went to shit already. Too late, now. 

#  **⛦ 5.**

_The night after_

“I think I got it, man! I think I killed It!”

Richie’s very confused. He must be missing some key elements here if all of a sudden 1) Eddie is straddling his thighs and 2) Pennywise is dead. 

He looks up at Eddie’s face, notices in a detached sort of way that his bandage is close to falling off his cheek. He can’t decipher a single thing he’s saying.  
A sound slap is what helps his brain reboot – the events of the last half hour flash in front of his eyes as he comes back to himself: Neibolt; Stan’s head; burning the tokens; Not Scary at all Scary Very Scary.  
Deadlights.  
He realizes his last words almost were a Die Hard quote he didn’t even get to finish, and that’s probably the most horrifying thing that happened to him tonight. 

“ _Rude,_ ” he tells Eddie, bringing a hand to his stinging cheek. The other one is still pressed to Eddie’s leg.  
“Hey, there he is! I'm sorry about the slap, I didn't know how to wake you up," he yells, and the sound of the Spider collapsing behind him almost covers his voice. “I think It’s dead – we need to leave, right the fuck _now_ -”

But he can’t finish the sentence, because Richie decides to do something incredibly selfish. It ends up saving Eddie’s life, but he’ll realize that only much later.  
So _fuck it_ he thinks, and tugs him down to kiss him, hard and filthy, right there in front of the ~~Turtle~~ God and the Losers – although Richie doubts his friends are paying attention, let alone God.  
Why care anymore? He got closer to death more often in the past two hours than in his years of substance abuse – hell, he almost cracked his skull open not two minutes ago. He’ll face the consequences on the off chance he gets out of Neibolt alive.  
  
Richie knows he saw something terrible in the Deadlights,   
_God please don’t make me remember I think I saw him d-_ _  
_ and life is so _so_ short, twenty-seven years of it already gone to waste. 

But something goes wrong.  
Actually, no, something goes right – Richie feels the realization deep in his bones, in his teeth, and he has no idea where it comes from.  
Eddie’s not kissing him, Eddie’s being pushed down on his chest – so hard it knocks the breath out of Richie’s lungs – by the shock-waves of Its claw flying over his head.  
It hits the ground not five inches from them. The force of the impact sends them both, still clinging to each other, tumbling away on the damp floor of the cavern.  
They end up near one of the walls, shielded from Its view, with Richie on top of Eddie. _This could have been a beautiful moment_ , he thinks. _Sucks that we could get skewered every second._

“It’s still alive!” Richie screams. He’s tugging Eddie back on his feet.  
“No fucking shit! Run, run, _run_ -”

He barely remembers what happens after that. He exists in a state of panic and terror and adrenaline-fueled frenzy for the entire time it takes to... _bully_ the extraterrestrial divine entity into submission?  
He doesn’t realize they’ve killed the fucker for good until Its heart turns to dust in their hands. Even then it’s only the threat of being crushed under literal tons of falling rocks that forces him to take his eyes off Eddie and start running to safety. _  
  
_

#  **⛦ +1.**

_One hour later_

“Are we really going to do this?” asks Ben. 

His stupid, sexy cowboy boots are laying on the ground with a pair of socks peeking out of them. Richie grins and looks to his left to catch Mike’s eyes: _you’re thinking what I’m thinking?_ _  
_ Mike smiles back. _Hell yeah, I am._ He raises three fingers for the countdown, and on the _three_ they start pushing Ben closer to the edge.  
“No, no – guys, what the _fuck!_ ” he exclaims, as Mike does all the heavy lifting and Richie laughs like the maniac he is. “Bev, help me out here-”  
A flurry of red passes them by when Bev sprints and jumps, beating the boys to it as she did all those years ago. There’s a loud splash – and a second one only moments later, when Ben gives in their bullying and lets them push him off. 

Mike immediately jumps as well. Bill takes off his shoes and shirt (why are all these forty-year-olds _ripped_? What the fuck went wrong with _Richie_?) and follows him. 

Still laughing, more relieved and tired than he recalls ever being, Richie turns to the only one left up there with him. 

It’s, now that he’s not too blinded by terror to notice, a beautiful day.  
Richie doesn’t know what he expected to happen when It finally bit the dust – for the entirety of Derry to collapse with the house on Neibolt street, maybe; for the rest of the Losers and him to have to fight their way back to clean air through sewers and ruins.  
Instead, this is what they get: a clear sky, birds chirping on the trees, a soft warm breeze that dried their dirty, matted hair in minutes. The water of the Quarry, while not any less green than he remembers it being, glints in the bright sun. 

And then there’s Eddie. No, scratch that: on the list of things that make this A Good Day To Be Alive, Eddie – covered head to toe in the grime and dirt of Its lair, eyes red and irritated, looking like he’s ready to sleep the next month off– comes before anything else. 

“This is a bad idea,” he says, but he’s already toeing off his shoes. “I’ll get the wound infected.”  
Richie shrugs off his unsalvageable shirt (shame, he really liked this one. He bought it specifically because it was the ugliest in the store), grinning the whole time at the wary expression on Eddie’s face. “Remember an hour ago when we almost got mauled by a Pomeranian? I think you’re gonna survive, Eds.”  
“If I do catch something I’ll send you the medical bill, mister hot-shot comedian.”  
And then they’re shoving each other off the cliff, still arguing and laughing, into the water of their childhood.

When Richie re-emerges, he’s immediately pushed back down by Ben. He almost gulps down a mouthful of water, but he can’t be mad when this is exactly the sort of shit he used to do when they were kids.  
Bill, Bev, and Mike make their way back to them, and for a while all they do is laugh and soak in the sun. Eddie accidentally loses his bandage – which has nothing on Richie dropping his glasses in the water as he tries to clean the blood off of them. (“Fucking shit, where the hell...? Im legally blind without them, guys- Bill found them? Oh, my savior! Come here Bill, let me kiss you, I promise I won’t use tongue. Much.”)

The conversation inevitably falls on Stan, whose absence becomes more painful the longer they let their lost childhood resurface.  
_He should be here with us_. Richie wishes fervently the last memory he has of him wasn’t of his severed head sprouting spider legs and trying to kill him. He knows for a fact that goody-two-shoes Stanley would be deeply offended by that. 

It’s difficult to stop thinking about how close they came to death. He has to swim away and dunk under the water when Bev raconteurs how she almost drowned in blood because he really, really doesn’t want to hear it. 

The water does a good job of muffling sound. He keeps his eyes closed and he wills his hands to stop shaking, but to no avail. He knows he’s crushing down from the adrenaline high that kept him on his feet until now, and he’s crushing _hard._  
He thinks of Stan, of the man he became and Richie will never get to meet. Then, as always, he thinks of Eddie. _I almost lost him today._ If Richie hadn’t tugged him down when he had, or had he dropped from the Deadlights inches further back, the claw would have passed straight through Eddie’s chest. 

He sees it happen, like a film playing on the inside of his eyelids. Eddie’s voice cutting off, his blood dripping steadily on Richie’s face, in his mouth. This must be what he saw in the Deadlights – he doesn’t know why he’s remembering just now, but he’d very much like it to stop.  
No dice, it keeps going instead. Images flash by fast, but not fast enough that Richie can’t feel all the excruciating grief that comes with them.  
Eddie being yanked back and falling like a broken doll far away from him. Richie screaming. A lot of blood, too much blood staining Richie’s hands and none of it his own. Richie begging, poking at Eddie’s wounded cheek to get a reaction; the unbearable lack of response that follows.  
It keeps going, it just keeps getting worse: _Honey, he’s dead_ ; Mike and Bill forcing him to leave him there, in the dark, _alone, guys you can’t do this we can’t leave him alone._ More: the exact scene Richie’s living right now, of the Losers swimming and laughing in the Quarry except that Eddie’s missing and how _dare_ they laugh when they made him leave him in the _sewers_ , afraid and _alone_. Richie standing by himself in front of a bridge, R+E the only thing he can see through the blur of tears; the realization that this is the first day of a life he doesn’t want to live and Richie wants to go back to childhood but he _can’t_ go back to childhood and _God, please, enough, enough, make it stop-_

A hand yanks him out of the water.  
Richie takes in a huge gulp of air and opens his eyes to see a pissed off Eddie staring back at him.  
“Can you explain to me,” he’s saying, “exactly what the _fuck_ you’re doing? Don’t make me worry like this, man, I thought you were drowning! Are you okay?”  
Riche tries to say something witty back, but what comes out instead is a sob. Eddie’s expression immediately softens, and he swims closer to him. “Rich, hey, it’s all good”, he says in that soothing voice he remembers from school nights spent in each other’s bedroom, whispering in the dark. “This whole experience has been – insane, but it’s all over now. For good this time.”

Eddie swipes his thumbs under Richie’s eyes, catching the tears that he was hoping wouldn’t be noticed.  
The love of his life gently touching his face is not something that Richie can handle right now, not with the memory of what it could have been still fresh in his mind.  
It’s funny – his heart is beating furiously in his chest, and yet he feels light-headed like not enough oxygen is reaching his brain.  
“Eds,” he murmurs, at a loss for any other word.  
“Don’t call me Eds. You know, I...I…” He hesitates, stops. Richie finds himself thinking that Eddie’s eyes are quite devastating from up close.  
He doesn’t register Eddie’s intentions until he’s going cross-eyed trying to focus on his face, because Eddie’s shifting closer, even when _closer_ means being pressed flush on Richie's shivering body.

Richie’s somehow still shocked when Eddie ends up kissing him. 

More than thirty years of fantasizing about this, even (if not especially) all those twenty-three in the middle spent losing himself in the bodies of others he could never love. Wishing he could feel what everyone else promised he would feel.  
Leaving Derry had meant losing Eddie, but the longing sure had followed him outside the borders of Maine and anywhere else since. Like a shadow, like a sickness, like the closest friend he could hope for.  
Eddie licks at his bottom lip and Richie – willing, body and soul, to give him anything he wants – lets his mouth fall open enough for their tongues to meet.  
It’s not that it’s _better_ than what Richie imagined.  
After all, he’s been picturing this exact moment since he was twelve and he has, in the meantime, taken to heart everything that love songs say about kissing in the hope he, too would, one day, understand it.  
So no, it’s not Eddie being a better kisser than he imagined that makes Richie go weak at the knees, or his hands clutch desperately at Eddie’s shoulders – it’s that he’s realizing only now how _ephemeral_ all those fantasies were. How easily they slipped through his fingers, only as thick as smoke, the shivers of pleasure they sent down his spine impossible to hold on to.  
But this, right here, right now? This feels real. _Eddie_ feels real.  
The way he’s sucking on Richie’s tongue feels _especially_ real and _oh my God let this never end_. 

Alas, the need to breathe breaks them apart.  
Richie starts laughing. “You asshole,” he gasps with his heart in his throat, “you _asshole_ , _I_ was supposed to kiss _you_. Been planning this since we were in middle school, what the fuck, Spaghetti.”  
Eddie touches their foreheads together. “Richie– Richie, please stop crying.”  
“‘M not crying,” he sobs. “I’m quite clearly _not_ crying. But honestly, Eds, what the _fuck._ How- since when-” God, how can he ask this without implying too much? Without assuming too much?  
“Since we were twelve,” confesses Eddie, only a whisper of distance from his lips. “I’ve been pathetically in love with you since we were twelve.”  
It makes Richie cry harder. They could have been together the _whole_ time – _look at what we’ve been robbed of_ , he wants to scream to the Universe and to the fucking Turtle, as he kisses Eddie again through the tears. _Look at what you took from me_.

Dumb, psychotic fucking _clown;_ dumb homophobic small-town mentality.  
Richie wishes he could go back and talk to his teenage self, because now he knows he has a killer argument: _how can you be dirty and rotten if Eddie feels the same, and there has never, ever been anything dirty about Eddie?_ _  
_ “I thought you knew, Richie,” he says when they break off the kiss. He’s starting to shiver from the cold water. “I’ve never been exactly subtle. No, shut up, that’s true – you’re just _blind_. I was always glued to your side, I didn’t let anyone else touch me as much as I let you. I used to get mad every time you made comments about some girl in school because I was _so_ jealous.”  
“I’ve made more jokes about fucking your mom than any other woman in town, Eddie. I was just trying to piss you off.”  
“Yeah, no, I was annoyed with you every minute of the day.”  
Richie grunts in frustration and hugs Eddie closer, trying to warm him up. “ _See_? How was I supposed to know you had a little gay crush on me?” he mumbles with his face hidden in the hollow of Eddie’s neck.  
“Fuck you, dude, don’t ever call it ‘little gay crush’ again.” He cups Richie’s face in his hands to raise it back up, and together they start swimming towards the shore. Riche doesn’t stop touching him for a second. “I had deep _feelings_ for you. Like, ‘knock the glasses off your face because I wanted to see your eyes’ kind of deep feelings. ‘Carve a heart with an R in it on the Kissing Bridge’ level of deep feelings, fuckface.”

 _No fucking way._ “Eds, are you serious? You’re not fucking with me, right?” A smile splits his face, so wide it hurts. Despite the sorrow still clawing at his heart – the grief for all the time they’ve lost – Richie’s so happy it almost makes him sick to his stomach. 

He feels thirteen again, and any thirteen-year-old who’s going through the terrifying roller-coaster of puberty would pity him for it.  
They wouldn’t know, though, that that was the happiest year of Richie’s life – and yes, he spent most of it running either after or from a shape-shifting alien and, yes, loving a boy like he loved Eddie brought him more pain than he’s willing to admit. But he also made the sort of childhood friends that know you like no one ever will again, that year. He hit said alien with a baseball bat, that year. That’s nothing to scoff at.  
  
Eddie steps out of the water and promptly collapses on the soft grass. He doesn’t even bitch about bugs crawling into his clothes or anything, and that’s the most obvious sign of how much the day has exhausted him. “No, I seriously did that. I did it after breaking my arm, it came out all janky because I had to use my left hand.”  
“Eds, Spaghetti Man, Eddie my love, I literally can’t believe this,” Richie says, pretending to be annoyed and not, you know, thrilled and delighted. He could break into song like a Disney princess. “I carved our initials on that bridge. You keep stealing my moves!”  
As Eddie puts his hands over his face and screams (which, fair enough, that’s an appropriate reaction to this situation), Richie crawls closer until he’s looming over him.  
_Cute, cute, cute_ , he thinks when Eds finally uncovers those doe-eyes of his, and how a forty-year-old man with a penchant for swearing is this cute escapes him. Eddie’s always been pretty as a fucking picture, it’s so _unfair_.  
“I still can’t believe you kissed me first, you dick,” he says. He leans down to brush his nose against Eds’, an innocent Eskimo kiss that has no business making his stomach tie up in knots the way it does. “You know how many times I _almost_ did it? I always got interrupted, the last time by the embodiment of Evil not two hours ago.”  
“Richie.”  
“And aren’t you _married_? I’m warning you, Eds, I don’t have it in me to be the other woman. I’m like, way too high maintenance for that-”  
“ _Richie_.”  
“Yeah?”  
“Shut the fuck up.”  
He grins against Eddie’s lips, the sound of their friends still splashing in the water muffled by his own furious heartbeat. “Shut me up yourself, you coward.”

So Eddie does, deep and wet and for as long as it takes for Richie to forget his name, let alone how to crack bad jokes.  
As far as techniques to render Trashmouth Tozier speechless go, it’s an effective one. He looks forward to Eds using it often in the future. For the rest of his life, even. 

**Author's Note:**

> I feel for Stephen King a lot because I, too, don't know how to write endings. 
> 
> I spent way too much time editing this, so if you find a typo you're legally allowed to execute me.  
> Let me know what you thought, guys! And if you're like me and you never know what to comment just know that you can just send a bunch of emojis my way and I _will_ cherish them.


End file.
